Persistent COVID-19: Exploring potential economic implications by Olivier Blanchard and Jean Pisani-Ferry published by PIIE (3/2021).
“When the COVID-19 crisis spread in early 2020, many economists who stepped forward with projections of its impact assumed that a one-time shock would be followed eventually by a return close to the status quo. Views have differed since then regarding both the time it would take to produce vaccines and the extent of potential economic scarring, but, until the last few months, few outside the public health community seriously contemplated the possibility that the pandemic could persist on a significant scale.
The emergence of new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has made this assumption questionable. While not the most likely outcome, worse scenarios can no longer be excluded. (For various adverse scenarios along these lines, see, for example, figure 3 in Bosetti et al. 2021.) As our colleagues Chad P. Bown, Monica de Bolle, and Maurice Obstfeld explain in a recent post, the periodic emergence of new, potentially dangerous variants will remain a serious threat so long as parts of the world lack access to effective vaccines…”
